From the Director

From the Director

This fall the University of Michigan Museum of Art celebrates collaboration and innovation through its exhibitions, collections, publications, outreach, and interpretation. All of these exciting projects and initiatives reflect UMMA's mission to connect visitors with objects and ideas that can meaningfully shape how they experience, filter, and understand their world.

As we outlined in the previous issue, the recent $650,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to the Museum will have far-reaching implications for how UMMA can engage more broadly with the University in its mission to encourage multidisciplinary and global thinking. One of the key components of the grant is what we call Collections Collaborations. On September 22 the Museum unveils an exhibition that came about through an impactful collaboration with another important collecting unit on campus: Discovering Eighteenth-Century British America: The William L. Clements Library Collection. This exhibition of exceptional highlights from the library provides the perfect complement to our other major fall exhibition—Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire—which brings together objects and material to contextualize the Clements' version of the great West canvas, The Death of General Wolfe.

Speaking of collections, thanks to grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Community Foundation of Southeast Michigan, and the Korean Cultural Heritage Association with additional support from the UM Nam Center for Korean Studies the Museum will introduce various multimedia tools and fresh voices and interpretation to its collections galleries. Please see the full story later in this issue.

The Museum's dynamic publishing program has ramped up with the launch of a new series called UMMA Books and the release this season of three exhibition-related publications that feature new scholarship and perspectives. Two are more traditional exhibition catalogues—African Art and the Shape of Time and Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire—while the volume offered in conjunction with YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is an innovative artists' book that functions as the second part of this incisive and exhilarating installation.